Science

An international team of researchers, led by Arizona State University chemist C. Austen Angell and University of Amsterdam’s Dr. Sander Woutersen, has observed one of the more intriguing properties predicted by water theoreticians — that, on sufficient supercooling and under specific conditions it will suddenly change from one liquid to …

The swirls and vortexes in the clouds of gas giants like Jupiter sometimes have analogs in Earth’s atmosphere, but some cloud formations are completely alien. NASA’s Juno probe has been in orbit of Jupiter since 2016, sending back fascinating images and data from the solar system’s largest planet. In the …

New data gathered by NASA’s Juno orbiter indicate that Jupiter’s winds run deep into its atmosphere and last longer than similar atmospheric processes found on Earth. The findings, published in the March 8, 2018 issue of the journal Nature, will improve understanding of Jupiter’s interior structure, core mass and, eventually, …

Jupiter has no tilt as it moves, so its poles have never been visible from our planet. But in the past two years, with NASA’s Juno spacecraft, researchers have gotten a good look at the top and bottom of the planet for the first time. What they found astounded them: …

Dr. Tanai Cardona, a researcher with Imperial College London, UK, studied molecular machines responsible for oxygenic photosynthesis and found the process may have evolved as long as 3.6 billion years ago. This image is the crystal structure of Photosystem I. Image credit: Tanai Cardona. Photosynthesis is the process that sustains …

A stupendously rare astronomical event occurred last year when Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, passed in front of a distant star. The extreme distances involved made this event almost impossible to observe, but the European Space Agency (ESA) helped astronomers pin down exactly where they needed to be to observe it. …

A new study shows how a group of ancient reptiles called captorhinids could detach their tails to avoid predation. This is an illustration of Captorhinus, a captorhinid reptile that lived during the Permian period, showing breakable tail vertebrae. Image credit: Robert Reisz. Captorhinids, also known as cotylosaurs, are a group …

An international research team led by Swedish Museum of Natural History scientists has found that stromatolites (solid, laminar structures of biological origin) from the 1.6-billion-year-old Chitrakoot Formation in India contain abundant fossilized oxygen bubbles. Fossilized bubbles and cyanobacterial fabric from 1.6 billion-year-old phosphatized microbial mats of the Chitrakoot Formation in …

A team of biologists from the University of Cambridge, UK, has found that a very rare and unstable mineral called vaterite is a dominant component of the protective silvery-white crust that forms on the leaves of a number of alpine plants. The findings are published in the journal Flora. Saxifraga …

An international team of researchers has discovered that systems enabling the South American lungfish (Lepidosiren paradoxa) to control blood flow during bouts of air-breathing have close similarities to those identified in mammals. The research appears in the journal Science Advances. The South American lungfish (Lepidosiren paradoxa). Image credit: OpenCage / …